


Oreos and One-Liners

by asleepby2



Category: X1 (Korea Band)
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Fluff and Humor, Light Angst, Like Barely There Angst, M/M, Meet-Cute, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, alternating povs, brief mentions of drinking, seungwoo is done with this soulmate business, seungyoun is all for it, theyre both airheads and i love them with all my heart, this is just a pile of crack and fluff, till hes not, untill hes not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 03:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21172949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asleepby2/pseuds/asleepby2
Summary: Seungwoo's soulmate mark is ridiculous and Seungyoun's is just downright impossible.





	Oreos and One-Liners

**Author's Note:**

> Soulmate mark AU where the first words your soulmate will say to you appear on your wrist on your sixteenth birthday.

Seungyoun had always dreamed of finding his soulmate. He was always enamored by the thought of finding someone who wouldn’t pick on him for his shrill voice or his skinny legs. Someone who would laugh at every joke he’d make. Someone who wouldn’t suck at soccer the way his best friend Hangyul did. To Seungyoun, finding his soulmate sounded like the best thing in the world.

So on his sixteenth birthday, after blowing out his candles and opening all his gifts, he tore the sleeve of his pajama top right off (to the horror of his grandmother) to take a look at the ink that had appeared on his wrist. His mother could only watch as the excitement on his face melted into incredulity.

Right there, in front of his entire family, he let out a curse so loud it reached the cranky old man that lived five blocks away from their house.

He narrowly avoided losing his computer rights that night but only because it _was_ his birthday. He would’ve counted it as a miracle on any other occasion but the grief was far too much for his little heart to take. To the little sixteen year old, it was as if the world unanimously decided to screw over his entire life in that very moment.

_“Hey!?” _Seungyoun practically screamed over the phone.

“Hey…? What’s up?” His best friend sounded done with the entire conversation as soon as he picked up the phone but nothing could sway Seungyoun’s rage.

“_Hey_, Gyul? Really? Out of all the things that I could’ve had written on my wrist, I get_ ‘hey’?_” Hangyul had to rip the phone away from his face at his friend’s incessant shrieking.

“Well, am I the one who put it there? What are you yelling at me for!?” Hangyul nagged back at him through his secondhand flip-phone.

“Gyul how am I supposed to find my soulmate when all I have to go by is _‘hey’?”_ Seungyoun grit out as he rained his tiny fists down onto his Doraemon pillow. “I bet there were at least _five_ people that said ‘hey’ to me today. I’ll never find them!”

There was a long pause before his best friend finally spoke up. “I really don’t know what to say… I mean I _want_ to say it’ll be fine and that, I don’t know, destiny has its ways or some cheesy shit like that but... it looks like the odds are stacked against you for this one Younie.”

“I know… I mean the first person that said ‘hey’ to me could’ve been my soulmate but my cousin read it out loud the moment he saw it and I refuse to believe my cousin is my soulmate.” He huffs out, hugging the poor pillow he’d been beating just moments ago to his chest.

“They’ll show up one day…” His friend tried to reason to him.

“I hope so, Gyulie…” There were tears glossing over his eyes as they hung up their phones but he refused to let them fall.

* * *

Seungwoo was never as invested in soulmates as his classmates were when he was sixteen. He always saw it as a burden more than a blessing. So not having a mark to show off to his friends during lunch break never irked him. Everyone around him seemed too wrapped up in this idea of “the perfect someone” who would somehow magically make all their worries fade away. It was all too cliché for him. So he went on with life as any normal sixteen year old would. Happy and unbothered by vague phrases marring his skin.

His life carried on this way till, on the night of his eighteenth birthday, as he gets reasonably buzzed with his close friends on the roof of their dorms, the dark marks slowly start to fade onto his skin letter by letter.

“That’s probably the most tragic thing anyone has ever had marked permanently on their body.” His friend Wooseok mutters under his breath before he takes another sip of his beer.

He hears Yohan choke on his cola from across him but he can’t find it in himself to do anything but stare at his wrist. To say he was stunned would be a gross understatement. He was flabbergasted. He was appalled. _He was bamboozled by lady fate herself. _

He’s seen people walking around with quotes that looked like they had been ripped right out of romance novels. Cheesy lines like _“you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen”_ or _“I can’t believe I’ve found you” _or the short yet effective one liner; _“wow.”_ He would’ve taken any of that in a heartbeat but as fate has it, it was probably his destiny to have a lunatic for a soulmate because the quote that stares up at him could only come from someone bordering on insane.

_“How much for the double-stuffed Oreos?”_ The mark stares up at him in its full glory.

“This is probably the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. This _has_ to be a joke, Woo.” Wooseok snickers from beside him. The younger stares down at his arm with a look that could be nothing other than pure pity.

“This literally just showed up. You saw it.” He mumbles back dully, still staring down at his arm in disdain.

“Hyung, let me have a look at it.” Yohan seems to have gotten a hold of himself after almost spilling half his bottle on his uniform. He takes Seungwoo’s arm and tries his hardest to rub the mark off but it doesn’t even smudge, to Seungwoo’s disappointment.

_This is his soulmate mark._

Seungwoo dedicates the rest of his night to scrubbing at his arm till it turns pink, desperately trying to get destiny to say _sike_.

* * *

From then on Seungwoo takes to wearing long sleeved shirts and armfuls of wristbands in an attempt to cover up the ridiculous mark. He tries makeup, tape, and bangles. At one point he grew desperate enough to contemplate covering it up with another tattoo altogether. (He got to the point of approaching an actual artist about it but they turned him down once they saw how long the quote actually was. “You’ll either have a really weird tattoo or a long black box.” He dropped the idea altogether just like that.) Thankfully, he stumbled upon a shop that made custom bands to cover up marks specifically. He ordered 5 bands on the spot and has never removed them since.

As if to rub salt all over Seungwoo’s hypothetical wounds, the world hasn’t led him to his harebrained soulmate yet. He’s done everything he could to ramp up the chances of him and his soulmate crossing paths. He’s worked in several retail and convenience stores. He dragged his friends to hang out at the 7-eleven near his apartment for months. At one point he straight up stalked a man looking to buy double stuffed Oreos at the grocery store to no avail. Not once did anyone think of asking him _how much the god damn double stuffed Oreos were._

The mark in itself wasn’t as bad as he made it out to be. It sounded more like an honest mistake than anything else. And he’s seen people with lines straight out of a _How to Flirt_ book so at least he doesn’t have one of those, he reasoned out with himself.

So he lives with the mark as anyone else would. In lieu of ignoring it, he opts to stare at it when he’s bored. Reading the words over and over again till the lines of text lose their meaning. Words melting into letters into symbols that mean nothing to him. (He learns later on that he had subconsciously taught himself to hate Oreos in the process but he was never fond of Oreos to begin with so it’s not a major loss.)

* * *

It took Seungyoun a while to get over his soulmate mark. At first he held on to the hope that one day he’d find his perfect friend. The perfect soccer mate. Someone he could trade stories with for hours on end. Someone who would give him the same butterflies that all his friends boasted about. Someone who would complete him, like the way Hangyul said his soulmate did.

Eventually any hope he had faded away in an ironic juxtaposition to the ever present ink on his wrist. He counted at least twenty _hey’s_ in the week following the emergence of his soulmate mark and not once did his words match up with any of his classmates’. He stopped counting after a week. He stopped hoping after about a year.

It shouldn’t have mattered to Seungyoun as much as it did but as his homeroom teacher once said: _“we humans are social creatures.”_ Seungyoun was probably the epitome of that very notion. He always chose to surround himself with the friends he made so easily during breaks. People took to his bright energy like moths to a lone candle flame. Perhaps that’s why he always came home high-strung. The flurry of emotions in his head only silenced by his mother’s soft humming and her warm embrace grounding him back to reality.

Thinking back to his earlier years, Seungyoun realizes that _that_ was very the reason he was so eager to have a soulmate when he was young. He yearned for someone to understand him the way his mother always did. Finally accepting that finding his _someone_ was next to impossible hurt him in some ways. That hopeful part of his young spirit chipped off and scabbed over as the years flew by yet he refused to wallow in self-pity for too long. So he moved on.

* * *

It’s a bright Saturday morning when Wooseok decides he’s had enough of Seungwoo acting like a recluse.

“Just because we have finals coming up in a week, doesn’t mean you have to fall into some weird scented-candle induced coma you giant nerd.” He shoves Seungwoo out of his bed (and out of his self-induced isolation) “to mingle amongst the living for once” -as he so helpfully explained. However instead of heading out to a bar with his friends like Wooseok had set him up to do, he chooses to go out to buy groceries instead._ He’s not getting wasted on the weekend before his big presentation. Hell no._

He’s long since given up on finding his soulmate after wasting a good chunk of his life worrying about the stupid mark on his wrist, so this trip is solely dedicated to the collection of ramen packs and toilet paper and nothing more (his budget wouldn’t allow it anyway.)

It doesn’t take much time for him to grab a week’s worth of ramen and five rolls of the specific brand of toilet paper Wooseok prefers so he finds himself with about three more hours till his roommate will let him back into their apartment. Three hours, surrounded by isles of instant pancake mix and cleaning supplies he’s sure he doesn’t need but the mop in their apartment is a year old and_ that mop practically squeezes itself. _

He roams around the grocery for a while till he finds himself loitering around the shelves of snacks and candies, looking for nothing in particular.

Seungwoo contemplates buying 2 different brands of peanut butter when he realizes dully that, sitting right atop the jars of crunchy peanut butter in its shining blue packaging, is an entire bag of double stuffed Oreos.

He doesn’t even have time to think before a hand creeps into his peripheral, grabbing the bag out from in front of him.

Then comes the line he’s been dreading his entire life.

“How much for the double stuffed Oreos?” A man asks from beside him.

Seungwoo isn’t quite sure how he feels in that moment. It finally happened. Someone _finally_ asked him for the price of the godawful double stuffed Oreos. But the man in front of him isn’t what he expected him to be. For starters, he doesn’t look like a lunatic. His hair is crazy, that’s for sure. There are streaks of blonde lying atop his natural black hair and he looks like some sort of weird ash blonde skunk. His eyes are sharp and they curve up when he grins at him from behind the pack of Oreos that he briskly shakes to get Seungwoo’s attention.

Those eyes same eyes now squint at him as the man’s smile drops into a pout.

“Hey uh… do you not work this isle? I could ask someone else.” The man looks embarrassed now as he slowly retreats with the bag of cookies.

Before his mind can even process what he’s doing, his hand shoots out and grabs the man’s arm before he could turn away. His eyes widen but he seems too shocked by the action to say a thing.

Only then does Seungwoo’s brain catch up with what he’s doing. This is his soulmate. After years of mindless wandering around grocery snack isles and days spent loitering at corner stores, he’s finally found his soulmate. The man across him, clad in a baggy brown polo that looks more like something Seungwoo would wear to bed, is _his _soulmate.

He then realizes that his own blue polo is the exact same shade as the grocery clerks’ uniforms. That would explain why his soulmate thought of asking him about the Oreos.

His soulmate thinks he works at this damned grocery, he grabbed his wrist like someone out of a drama and he still hasn’t said a single word about it. He’s probably thinking of reporting him to the manager for misconduct against a customer.

_He should say something before this web gets more convoluted than it already is._

“H-hey…” Seungwoo chokes out in the dumbest way possible.

The man, _his soulmate,_ stands there staring at him for an uncomfortable stretch of time before he gently pulls his arm out of his grasp. He has an unreadable look on his face, one that looks like a vague mix between uncertainty and disdain. Seungwoo can’t help but feel put off by how miffed his soulmate looks but still neither of them move from where they stand in the middle of the snacks isle, staring at each other as if waiting for the other to make the first move.

He can see his soulmate’s hand twitch in an aborted motion towards his other wrist, where his soulmate mark undoubtedly sits. At that, Seungwoo decides he’ll make the first move if his soulmate really is that wary of him.

Carefully, he peels off the band around his wrist to reveal the very mark he’s loathed for years. Seungwoo slowly lifts his gaze to study his soulmate’s reaction, admittedly still nervous from the vague face he made moments ago.

His face is still a myriad of expressions and is equally as unreadable as the last look he had on but it’s definitely not disgust, to Seungwoo’s relief.

At first, the man’s brows furrow as he slowly reads through the mark on his wrist. His eyes clearly scanning through each line of text carefully. Then, with an almost comedic gasp, his expression morphs into pure shock. His sharp eyes widen as they shoot up to meet Seungwoo’s with a look that, put plainly, screamed _“no fucking way.”_

Seungwoo can’t find it in himself to do anything but chuckle and nod back at the other man at the sheer absurdity of it all.

“Show me yours?” Seungwoo knows there’s no way this couldn’t be his soulmate. Not at how stupidly specific his mark is but he still wants to confirm his suspicions_ just in case._

“Take me out to dinner first!” His soulmate is seemingly taken over by a sudden wave of giddiness. His eyes curve up into crescent moons when he smiles up at Seungwoo, laughing at his own joke.

The sudden shift in the man’s demeanor catches Seungwoo off guard so bad that a flush makes its way onto his cheeks.

“You know what I mean.” He chokes out.

At that, his soulmate bunches his sleeve up to his elbows to show him the three letters, lying plainly on his pale wrist.

“Oh…” Seungwoo hums out as he stares down at the other man’s wrist. “It isn’t much to go off of, huh?”

A soured smile flashes across his soulmate’s face before it melts into something softer. Something more akin to relief.

“It’s not as bad as walking around with an Oreo ad on your arm.” His soulmate snickers back at him.

‘_You did this to me’ _Seungwoo wants to gripe at him but it might be too soon for that; he might scare his own soulmate away before they even get to know each other properly.

"You learn to live with it." Seungwoo shrugs back at him. He slowly peers up at the other from behind his bangs and sees that his soulmate’s eyes are trained down onto the markings on his wrist. He has a dopey over-the-moon grin that makes Seungwoo’s cheeks warm to no end.

“I suppose so…” The man mumbles softly to himself, eyes still locked onto Seungwoo’s wrist.

He can tell this is a moment that both of them have been waiting a long time for, if the way neither of them dare to move a muscle is anything to go by. But Seungwoo’s arm is growing numb from holding it up for the man with the oddly bleached locks and besides, he’s been staring at Seungwoo’s arm for way too long by this point. So against better judgement, Seungwoo decides to lower his arm with an awkward cough.

The motion seems to snap his soulmate out of his stupor; his sharp eyes snap up to his with a start.

“Oh! I- sorry I got lost in my head.” He flounders with his words and smacks his forehead for a good measure before laughing at his own over the top antics.

The man’s mannerisms and ticks align perfectly with what Seungwoo always thought his soulmate would be. Maybe he’s not a complete lunatic but he’s definitely unlike anyone Seungwoo has met before; judging by the way he managed to get Seungwoo to warm up to him almost instantly the moment they met.

It’s ridiculous how just moments ago he wouldn’t have given a damn about finding his soulmate and now he’s here standing in front of him, in between isles of chips and peanut butter jars, feeling like he’s staring at a little piece of the sun.

“No, it’s okay.” He smiles back gently. “I guess we were both sort of thrown in for a loop back there…”

“Yeah.” His soulmate stares at him like he did to his mark, with the same intense look of awe shining behind the mirth in his eyes. Seungwoo can’t help but turn his head away for a bit. Just to avoid getting _too_ flustered by his soulmate’s gaze.

“We’ve been standing here for over an hour and I still don’t know your name.” Seungwoo chimes gently in an attempt to deflect the man’s stare.

“Oh!” Somehow everything he says comes out like a cartoon sound effect. “I’m Cho Seungyoun, your soulmate apparently.” He huffs out the last part like he can’t quite believe what’s happening.

Seungwoo can’t help but feel the same way.

“Han Seungwoo. Your soulmate too, apparently.” He hums out with a gentle smile.

Their hands meet halfway and just like that they find something they’ve both long since given up on.

**Author's Note:**

> Do I have an au to continue: yes  
Did I write this in a sad attempt to motivate myself: yes
> 
> This is basically just "soulmate marks cept they both suck."


End file.
